When Thursday's luncheon was announced, Muriel sent down word that she had a headache.

"_What_ do you do when a girl locks her door on you?" asked Ethel of her husband.

"They never lock their doors on me," said Preston.

"Do be serious. What in the world do you make of all this?"

"My dear," answered Newberry, "the only thing I am bothered about is what _you_ may already have made of it. I'm afraid you have made a mess."

"But, Preston----"

"There is nothing to be done now but to wait, my dear."

So it befell that when, exactly at nine o'clock that evening, Stainton's card was sent up to Miss Stannard, Miss Stannard's guardians, one of whom stayed long in the library with ears vainly intent, were as much at sea regarding their ward's decision as was Stainton himself.

Muriel's own emotional condition was no more enlightened. Like all young people, she had had her visions of romance, and, like the visions of most young people, hers had been uninstructed, misdirected, misapplied.

All women, it has been said, begin life by having in their inmost heart a self-created Prince Charming, who proves the strongest rival that their destined husbands have to endure. Such a prince was as much Muriel's as he is other girls'! She had created him unknowingly from the books she had read, from the pictures she had seen, out of blue sky and sunshine and the soft first breezes of Spring: the stuff of dreams. But she was eighteen and no longer in school, and Stainton had given her a glimpse of the great happy thing that she accepted as life.

What lacked? Something. While she descended the stairs she counted his attributes in her aching brain. He was handsome, brave, well esteemed.

If he was not young, he did not seem anything but young. What was youth, that it should be essential? What did it amount to if it were but the unit of measurement for a life--a mere figure of speech--something simply verbal? This man had, it appeared, the reality without the name.

What was this quality worth if its virtue resided in its name and not in its substance? Why should she even ask these questions--and why, when she asked, could she find no answer?

She paused. It struck her suddenly that the fault might lie in her.

Perhaps it was she that lacked. Perhaps--as a traveller may see an unfamiliar landscape by a lightning flash--she saw this now; the loss might be not in Stainton; it might be something that she had not yet acquired.

Therein, to be sure, was the clew to the muddle. Nearer than that lightning flash of the situation she did not come. Love, as we know it in our civilisation, is not an element: it is a composite. In this girl, descending to meet the man that wanted to marry her and even now ignorant of the answer she should give him, there lay the Greater Ignorance. Companionship, affection, kindly feeling--all these things and more--she had for him; but the omnipotent force that welds and dominates and forges these elements into one, unified, spiritual, intellectual, and bodily love, the law that begets this and nourishes it--this she did not as yet know, had never known.

The Newberry drawing-room was as it had been two weeks before. The crackling fire danced over its gilt-and-white prettiness, the heavy, ivory curtains, which folded behind her, shut out all the world.

Stainton rose from a seat beside the fire, much as if he had been there since last she saw him. The interval of a fortnight seemed as nothing.

She noticed again how tall and strong and fine he seemed, how virile, how much the master, not only of his own fate but of himself. He came forward with outstretched hands.

"Have you thought things over?" he asked.

There was no manoeuvring now, no backing and filling. The time for pretence was pa.s.sed.

"Yes," she said. "I have thought of nothing else, and yet--and yet----"

His brows contracted slightly, but he kept his steady hand upon the tight rein by which he was accustomed to drive himself.

"And yet you aren't sure?" he supplied. "You have not been able to make up your mind?"

She hung her head. On the edge of the hearth-rug she traced a stupid figure with the toe of her bead-embroidered slipper.

"I can't tell," she said, "I've tried. I've tried very hard----"

"To love me?"

"No." She wished to be honest; she determined upon being honest. She owed him that, even should it hurt him. "No," she said, "not to love you; for if I had to try to love you, it wouldn't be real love at all, would it? What I tried to find out was whether I do love you now."

It was on his lips to say that, as surely as trying to love would not create love, so, if love was, it need not be sought. But she raised her face when she ended, and, when the light fell upon that, he forgot all casuistry. Her slim figure just entering upon womanhood, her blue-black hair, her damp red lips and her great dark eyes: she was as he had seen her first, like an evening in the woods, he reflected: warm and dusky and bathed in the light of stars.

Quite suddenly and wholly without premeditation he came to her and seized her hot palms in his cool hands. For years he had mastered pa.s.sion; now, at this sight of her after the two weeks' separation, pa.s.sion mastered him. The rein had snapped.

"Muriel," he said, "I can make you love me. You don't know--there are things you don't know. I can make you love me. Do you hear that? Muriel?

Answer! Do you understand? I will make you love me. I will!"

She looked up at his face. It was alight as she had never yet seen any man's. Then, before she had gathered her breath to give him an answer, she was seized by him. She was crushed to him; she was held tight in his strong arms. She was hurt, and, as she was hurt, their lips met.

The miracle--oh, she was sure now that it was the miracle--happened.

Something new clutched at her throat. Something new, wonderfully, terrifyingly, deliciously new, gripped at her heart and set her whole body athrill and trembling. The blood pounded in her temples. She tried to look at him, but a violet mist covered her eyes and hid him.

"Kiss me!" she was whispering as his lips left hers. "Kiss me again. I know now. I love you!"

VIII

"THE WORLD-WITHOUT-END BARGAIN"

And so they were married. Mrs. Newberry had her way: they were married within the month and within the church.

Preston's troubles, meanwhile, were hard to bear, and were not borne in silence. By faith, as has been noted, he was a Presbyterian; but by reason of his social position it was inc.u.mbent to attend occasionally--so often, in fact, as he went to church at all--an establishment of the Protestant Episcopal persuasion. Yet it appeared, when he came to arrange for the wedding of his wife's niece, which was the first he had ever arranged for, that there were ecclesiastical distinctions about weddings concerning which he had never previously dreamed. There were certain churches where one was expected to be a regular Sunday attendant; but when it came to a wedding, these would not serve: a wedding, to be socially correct, must occur in one of two or three churches in which, apparently, nothing else ever occurred. They seemed to be set aside for the exclusive business of marrying, and they married only exclusive people. Through one's s.e.xton one rented one of these as one rents the Berkeley Lyceum, save that, in the matter of the wedding church, its rector is thrown in for good measure; then, when one proposed to introduce one's friend Buggins, the composer, to play the wedding-marches, one was told that only the church's regular organist was permitted to play the church's superb organ, and that, if one really required music, the regular organist could be hired at so much--and "so much" was not so pleasantly indefinite as it sounded.

"I never before realised what my father-in-law went through for me,"

said Preston.

"Things are never so hard as you think they'll be," said his wife in an effort at comfort.

"Things are always worse," replied the uncomforted Newberry. "Thank the Lord, I'll never have to arrange for another marriage. I thought that was Heaven's business, anyhow: I thought marriages were made in heaven.

I'd rather be the advance agent of a minstrel show."

Still, in some fashion or other--and Mrs. Newberry and the papers were satisfied that it was the very best fashion--the thing was accomplished.

There was an immediate "Engagement Dinner" given by Ethel; there were other dinners given by Jim; there were luncheons given by friends of Muriel and the Newberrys; then, at last, there was Stainton's bachelor-supper to George Holt and the ushers-to-be, whom Holt had collected, held at Sherry's, whence everybody except the host departed in one of the four socially requisite stages of drunkenness, and so the climax, with the hired church, the hired parson, the frock coats, the staring eyes, the odour of flowers, the demure bridesmaids, and the hired organist playing Wagner and Mendelssohn and "The Voice That Breathed O'er Eden."

Stainton did not long remember all these things, was never even aware that at this wedding, as at all the other public demonstrations that go by the same name, the young girls wondered what it portended and the young men smirked because they knew. After a brief engagement in which the flames of his desire had grown in expectant intensity upon the fuel of those minor favours which conventional engagements make the right of the man, he was hurried into the church in no state of mind that a sane man would willingly describe as sane. He remembered only that he felt white and solemn; that he had an interminable wait in the vestry with Holt, a silently reconciled best-man, and a second wait at the altar rail, where he was the centre of interest and commiseration until the bride appeared, when he fell to an importance scarcely equal to that of the clergyman and far below that of the pew opener. Only these things he remembered, and that Muriel, with her sweetly serious face admirably set off by the white in which she was clad, looked all that he wished her to look and strangely spiritual besides. The next event of which he was at all certainly conscious was the hurried reception and the swiftly following bridal breakfast where Preston Newberry made truly pathetic references to some "lamp of sunshine" that had been "filched forever"

from the Newberry home.

Preston was more than a little relieved. He found it in his heart to wish Muriel well.

"Good-bye, youngster," he said, when she came to him in her going-away gown. "Good-bye." ("For the sake of goodness, Ethel, stop that snivelling!") "He's a fine old buck and he'll be kind to you, I'm sure."

("My dear, _stop_ it! Hasn't the girl got what you've wanted her to have ever since you set eyes on him?")

Muriel heard the asides addressed to Mrs. Newberry and winced at the adjective openly applied to Jim, but she bit her lip and tossed her head and went away radiant for the first month of their honeymoon in Aiken, where she was happy with new and tremendous delights that received and asked and gave and demanded and grew.

She had not before adequately guessed at happiness of this sort. It was as if her material world had always been at twilight--a soft, luminous, fragrant twilight, but twilight nevertheless--and that now, without the intervention of darkness, there had come the undreamed of wonder of dawn. She ran forth to meet the sunlight. She was eager, primal. She opened her arms to it. She gave herself to it because she gloried in it. Unsuspected capacities, unknown emotions welled in her, and she gave them forth and seized their purchase price. Her husband became in her eyes something glorious and marvellous. There was no more question of his years; she thought no more of that than any Greek girl would have questioned the youth of a condescending Zeus. He revealed; he seemed even to be the maker of what he revealed. She knew love at last; she was certain that she knew love. She was in love with love.